Fox News Flash top headlines for Dec. 17
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A former Texas police officer admitted to fatally shooting his girlfriend and their unborn child, reversing his not guilty plea, bringing a high-profile murder case to an end months before it was set to go to trial.
With his guilty plea, ex-Austin police officer VonTrey Clark, 36, will receive a lesser sentence of life in prison without parole as a part of his plea agreement. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty.
Clark confessed to murdering Samantha Dean, then 29 and working as a police crime victims counselor, in 2015 while she was seven months pregnant with his child. Dean’s body was found in February 2015 behind a deserted office building in Bastrop County. She’d been shot three times.
VonTrey Clark
Clark had urged Dean to get an abortion because he has a family with another woman, prosecutors said. When she refused, Clark hired two men to kill Dean for $5,000, they said.
Clark fled to Bali, Indonesia, without permission to leave Travis County, and was fired from the Austin Police Department in July 2015. Indonesian police detained Clark in August on a visa-related issue, and federal agents extradited him back to the U.S. a month later.
Clark was charged with capital murder and pleaded not guilty in November 2015. One of Clark’s two associates in the murder-for-hire, Kevin Watson, was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty in 2016 but switched to a guilty plea months later. He will be serving 35 years in prison. The second accomplice has an arraignment hearing set for Jan. 6.
Samantha Dean’s family was present in the courtroom Monday.
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“The one person that I can turn to for moral advice or support is gone, thanks to you,” Samantha’s younger sister Taylor Dean said, according to the Austin American-Statesmen. “You stole my favorite person.
“But that’s not all. You stole an innocent child, you stole my niece. It’s incredible that someone so small could bring so much joy,” she went on. “You stole our future memories, too.”
Samantha’s mother spoke too.
“This man right here,” Kimberly Dean said, motioning toward her husband, “this is a real man.
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“This has tore him to his core. You need to understand that this man spoils all of his girls. We ask nothing, we need nothing, we provide everything,” she said. “So when this situation happened, it is me that saved you. I asked him to please allow the system to deal with you. You took away everything when you took Sammy.”
She added that in the days leading up to her daughter’s murder, she had been shopping for car seats for the child, who would have been named Madeline.
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“God was offering you the opportunity to do the right thing and find love through a little cherub that would have softened your soul,” she said. “Madeline was your chance to make things better. I know she would have loved you unconditionally. Yet you missed that opportunity and you chose to kill her.”
